19/10: The Irony of Anti-American Rhetoric
Category: America and the World
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
Please note this brilliant Gerard Baker essay via the TimesOnline :
The US is a great place to be anti-American
"Al Gore...Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy...Michael Moore...[the] Dixie Chick[s]...Sean Penn...[Jimmy Carter]...Bill Clinton."
"It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves."
"I can only laugh when I see the popular portrayal of George Bush’s America in much of the international media. Supposedly serious commentators will say, without evident irony, that free speech is under attack, that Bush’s wiretapping, Guantanamo-building, tourist-fingerprinting regime is terrifying Americans into quiet, desperate acquiescence in the country’s proliferating crimes."
Read the entire piece here. I only wish I had written it. Thanks to Tocqueville for the heads-up.
The US is a great place to be anti-American
"Al Gore...Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy...Michael Moore...[the] Dixie Chick[s]...Sean Penn...[Jimmy Carter]...Bill Clinton."
"It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves."
"I can only laugh when I see the popular portrayal of George Bush’s America in much of the international media. Supposedly serious commentators will say, without evident irony, that free speech is under attack, that Bush’s wiretapping, Guantanamo-building, tourist-fingerprinting regime is terrifying Americans into quiet, desperate acquiescence in the country’s proliferating crimes."
Read the entire piece here. I only wish I had written it. Thanks to Tocqueville for the heads-up.
